Comedy duos are a longstanding “Saturday Night Live” tradition, whether it’s Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as the wild and crazy Festrunk brothers; Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as the basement broadcasters Wayne and Garth; or Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as the Weekend Update co-anchors. Now in its 51st season, “S.N.L.” has found an unlikely pairing in James Austin Johnson and Colin Jost, playing President Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
This topical twosome was back in this weekend’s opening sketch, which nominally took place at a gas station where a mother and father (Ashley Padilla and Mikey Day) were explaining to their two children (Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernández) that they’d have to leave one of them behind, because of rising gas prices.
“Why does gas cost so much?” Hernández asked.
This was Johnson’s cue to enter as Trump, freezing the scene and interjecting: “The Epstein Files! Kidding. But possibly not. It’s called butterfly effect, right?”
Johnson said, “You might remember me from such campaign promises as lower gas prices and no more wars.”
He continued: “Psych! We love to make promises because a promise is just a lie that hasn’t happened yet.”
Johnson threw in a couple of jokes referencing this weekend’s host and musical guest, Harry Styles. “The stock market is going in one direction: down,” Johnson said.
Then, in a loose parody of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” Johnson sang, “You don’t know you’re broke as hell.”
He added that the United States “will win this war because Iran is old and nobody likes them — Iran is like ballet and opera, and we’re Timmy Chalamet.”
Johnson mentioned that he’d been meeting with “the nation’s top minds,” citing Jake Paul, who was booed at his boxing match with Mike Tyson. “We hate to hear boos,” Johnson said.
“Did someone say booze?” said Jost, popping out of the back of a car, unleashing an avalanche of beverage cans.
Jost said that, despite appearances to the contrary, he’d only had “a couple of road sodas” to drink. He showed off his “beautiful size 16 Florsheim shoes,” an overly large gift from the president.
As for why he had been in a stranger’s car, Jost said, “I’ll tell you the same thing I say when people ask about our plans for Iran: ‘I don’t know.’”
Despite the presence of land mines — or possibly, he noted, “water mines” — in the Strait of Hormuz, Jost insisted that the waterway, crucial to oil exporting, had not been closed. “If you’re an oil tanker and you’re driving it and you see one of the mines, just do what I used to do at every DUI check point: Close your eyes and gun it.”
Medical drama of the week
The HBO Max series “The Pitt” has made meat-and-potatoes hospital dramas hot again, but until “S.N.L.” is ready to build its own 24,000-square foot, 360-degree reproduction of a real-life emergency room, we probably won’t get a full-scale parody of the show. In the meantime, “Pitt”-heads will have to be satisfied with this slightly downsized send-up: on “MAHAspital,” the “phony liberal science” of “The Pitt” is replaced — with the putative input of its credited producer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — by costumed doctors who would rather prescribe beef tallow, bull semen and methylene blue to their ailing patients. Padilla supplies an all-too-brief impersonation of “The Pitt”’s Katherine LaNasa, and Johnson (with an outrageous body prosthetic) plays Kennedy himself, who shows up in the ER with a bear he hit with his car. (The bear turns out OK, folks.)
Weekend Update jokes of the week
Over at the Weekend Update desk, the co-anchors Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the war in Iran.
Jost began:
Today marks the start of the third week of the war in Iran. Which is weird because someone told me that we already won it on the first day. [His screen showed a headline: “Trump: ‘Won War on First Day’”]. Usually when a team wins, they don’t then stay on the field for three more weeks. It kind of seems like the main thing we’ve done so far is get rid of an 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei and replace him with a 56-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei. You know, a younger crazier bad guy, hellbent on revenge. We did it. Also, is it weird that I’m kind of jealous that Iran now has a leader under 80 years old? God, remember how much better our country was doing when we had a young Muslim leader? [His screen showed a picture of former President Obama.] President Trump said in an interview that he believes Iran’s Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is damaged but probably alive in some form. Which is also a pretty great description of Trump.
Che continued:
Khamenei was chosen by Iran’s 88-member Assembly of Experts. [The sound of an explosion was played.] Make that 62 members. President Trump posted a message on Truth Social reading, “Iran will have a great future. Make Iran Great Again.” Or MIGA. As in, this MIGA crazy.
Weekend Update guest of the week
It’s been a moment or two since the Weekend Update desk was visited by an “S.N.L.” cast member impersonating a real-life personality to comment on news developments. (Unless you want to count Hernández and Sherman’s recent turn as Punch the monkey and his mom.) This weekend, Jeremy Culhane stopped by to play Tucker Carlson, the conservative pundit, who was sharing his thoughts on this year’s Academy Award nominees. It’s mostly Culhane sending up Carlson’s rhetorical style and persistent tone of feigned disbelief, while offering contrived right-wing critiques of movies like “Hamnet”: “We’re not allowed to say ‘Hamlet’ anymore,” Culhane complained. “They took the ‘L’ and gave it to the ‘GBTQ.’” Luckily for all involved, he said that he had not seen “One Battle After Another.”
Dave Itzkoff is a former Times culture reporter.
The post Why Are We in Iran? On ‘S.N.L.’, Pete Hegseth Has the Answer: ‘I Don’t Know’ appeared first on New York Times.
